(Washington, D.C.) -- Senator John McCain issued the following statement in response to President Clinton's decision to renew most favored nation trading status for China. "After campaigning against President Bush's policy of separating trade and human rights issues in our relationship with China, President Clinton has now chosen to adopt that policy, for the most part. His intention to renew Most Favored Nation trading status for China is a sound, if politically embarrassing, decision. "China's human rights record is, without doubt, a poor one. The fact that the situation is better than it was 10 or 20 years ago is not sufficient reason to ignore China's gross violation of the rights of its citizens today. Nor should we allow China and other Asian countries to transform legitimate human rights complaints into a dispute between East and West about whether government's responsibilities to the governed are premised on respect for individual rights or society's interests. "However, there are better ways to impress upon China's leaders how seriously we view their transgressions against the rights of man than revoking MFN. Extensive trade relations with China will encourage over time a better human rights situation in that country. "Complex economic relations with the West necessarily weaken the government's control over the flow of information in China – an indispensable instrument of tyranny. Moreover, as more and more southern Chinese prosper by virtue of their own industry and imagination, more and more of them should find interference from a central authority to be intolerable. "The President has decided not to allow our relationship with the greatest power in Asia to be determined solely by our interest in advancing our political values. That advocacy should remain an important motivating factor in American foreign policy, but its efficacy is seriously undermined when we allow it to take precedence over the protection of our security interests. "With the President's decision to renew MFN, we should now make clear to Beijing, in councils more private than the pages of the New York Times, that we expect their help in addressing our most troubling security threat, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. "China's own export policies have exacerbated the problem. But its current reluctance to refrain from publicly undermining the credibility of U.S. warnings to North Korea has helped to make the most immediate expression of this global problem almost intractable. "We should inform China -- again, quietly -- that our policy of accommodation with North Korea has failed, and we intend to seek a resolution imposing economic sanctions against North Korea in the U.N. Security Council. We should further forcefully inform the Chinese that there is no other issue involved in our relations of comparable importance. A mutually advantageous engagement between our two countries will simply not be possible absent their cooperation on the sanctions question. "Once the President takes this position with the Chinese, he should avoid the temptation to vacillate -- a tendency that has undermined so much of his foreign policy -- and hold to his position firmly. By so doing, the President may yet turn a politically embarrassing retraction of his previous position on MFN into an advantage for the security interests of the United States, and, in the process, learn an important lesson about the responsibilities that accrue to the leader of the free world." # # #